Tracking web engagement can sometimes be difficult for digital marketers of international organizations. Reporting and segregation are important but they can also be overwhelming. Luckily, there’s hardly a metric that Google Analytics lacks. As you probably already know, the Custom Report feature in GA can help you tailor any web report to your company’s unique needs and KPIs.

You already know how to build a custom Content Performance Report, so now it may be useful to learn how to track our international engagement and activity with a Global Engagement Report. The goal of this report is to help you identify the “hot” geographical areas your traffic is coming from.

Jump right into it

Once in the “Customisation” tab, go to “Custom Reports” and select “New Custom Report”. Here’s when the fun part really starts. Once you’ve filled out the basics such as title and the name of your report tab (yes, you can have multiple report tabs within one report, just like in Excel), you’ll choose metrics from the metrics group. As you can see from the screenshot below, in the more general terms of this example we’ve picked the following metrics:

% New Sessions – An estimate of the percentage of first-time visits.

Organic Searches – The number of organic searches that occurred within a session.

Entrances/Page Views –The percentage of page views which were entrances to the site.

Hits – Total number of hits sent to Google Analytics, for this reporting view (profile). The metric sums all hit types, including page view, custom event, e-commerce and other types. Note that this number is based on the reporting view (profile), not the property, and therefore is not the same as the property’s hit volume.

Social Actions – The number of social actions that occurred.

Time on Page – The average amount of time users spent viewing a specific page or screen, or set of pages or screens.

Bear in mind that if any of the above-stated parameters are not relevant to your KPIs, you should substitute them for another option. The metric’s categories, “Acquisition,” “Ad Exchange,” “Behavior,” “Goal Conversions,” “Publisher,” “Social” and “Users” cover almost anything you might need.

More tabs, filters, and views

Since this is a global report focusing cross-continental traffic data, the Dimension Drilldown is “Country.” If you’re interested in “City” and/or “Continent” simultaneously to “Country,” once you have set up this report tab, you can duplicate it and only change the Dimension Drilldown to “Region,” “City” or “Continent.” This way your report will be as globally holistic as possible.

The filter option is a useful feature if you want to exclude a specific dimension, so feel free to explore it. An important note is to make sure that your Google Analytics account has an Admin-level filter of your company’s traffic worldwide and the traffic of any digital marketing agency you may be working with. You don’t want internal data to be skewing your reporting.

For the purpose of this report, the Views tab can be particularly useful. If, like StoneShot, your company too has separate websites for the different countries it operates in, simply select all of them from the drop-down menu in this tab. Data from all of them will be included in the report. Note that if your Google Analytics account doesn’t have access to a certain regional website, you won’t find that website in the “Views” tab. Worry not, it’s an easy fix – just ask your overseas marketing colleagues for access – it only takes a minute.

Finals steps

The only thing left to do is hit save, and you can regulate the time-frame of the report, share it, export it, and even sort by various metric groups. For any analytics-related questions feel free to reach out at enagage@stoneshot.com. Happy analyzing!